These Resources Cover a Wide Range of Historical Times and Places
- OER Project- Free Standards Based Online History CurriculumFree online curricula are created by teachers and scholars. Offer complete social studies courses aligned to state standards. Explore teaching materials, planning resources, professional-development offerings, and a helpful online teacher community.
Site provides Alingments to Texas and other state teaching standards.
OER Project courses align with state standards-
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TexasTexas educators, embark on your lesson planning with World History Project: Origins or Big History Project, aligned to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills Standards. |
- Finding Online Primary Sources (Harvard)A wealth of links to a wide variety of links to free online historical resources. Incudes resources for various time periods, geographical locations, and languages.
Note several sub-guides available for even more resources. - 68 Cultural, Historical and Scientific Collections You Can Explore OnlineSpecial Report in Smithsonian Magazine. Published during COVID pandemic.
Wide variety of historical resources avaiable in digital form. - Runaway (Slave) Project- Includes Lesson PlansThis project was founded to study the history of enslaved people’s resistance in the United States through the collection of fugitive ads. To date, we have collected and processed 55,632 ads, using our multi-tiered AI program to scrape and understand ads from more than 500 early historical newspapers. We have made this information available for use by researchers, scholars, and citizen-students on our website. We are also in the process of using this information to commemorate and memorialize freedom runners with monuments to be placed across the United States.
Finding Sources on the Open Web (A few Places to Start)
Finding Primary Sources on the Open Web
There is no one way to find digitized primary sources on the Internet. The following offers methods for finding online historical resources which are more focused than a simple Google search. Most find items within digital collections. A few search the full text.
In most one cannot effectively limit to archival/manuscript sources. Specific searches usually work better than broad topical searches. Searches for proper names often yield good results.
General Google searches may yield very many results, and it may take much sifting through the results in order to find relevant items. Using Google Advanced Search with specific search terms can help yield more focused results. Detailed instructions for searching Google Advanced Search.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) searches metadata and some full text, from over 2000 sources of academic open access documents. About 60% of the documents indexed are available full text. The metadata searched is provided by the source and tagging is often inexact. This is a vast collection of documents and has much not available elsewhere.
Use Browsing to narrow your search to subject area (e.g., Literature) or Document type (e.g., Manuscript, broadly construed). Open Browsing and choose-Dewey Decimal (for Subject), choose major subject to see next finer level, twice. After choosing View Records add a search term to the Subject Term or Document Type:
OAISTER is a subset of WorldCat for open access online academic material. It can be useful in separating digitized primary sources from the numerous ebooks in WolrldCat. It includes digitized books and journal articles, open access publications, manuscript/archival material, photographic images, audio and visual files, data sets, and theses. It includes such a vast range of resources that digitized archival and other primary sources are lost in the abundant results if a broad topical term is used. So it is best to use a narrow term or proper name. Thus "Act-Up" yields archival letters. It is possible to limit a search to Archival Material, but I have not found this to be useful.